“Learning Torah through Partnership”
A Viewer’s Guide
By Allison Cook and Orit Kent
This article is a companion piece to the video “Learning Torah through Partnership.” It provides
readers with background information and explains features of the Pedagogy of Partnership1
illustrated in the video. It grows out of the work of the Beit Midrash Research Project at the Jack,
Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education, at Brandeis University.
Context: Theory in Action
This video emerges from a design experiment the authors conducted with a cohort of seventh grade
Hebrew school students. The study was designed to explore and document the implementation and
effects of a havruta-based pedagogy we call, “The Pedagogy of Partnership” (POP).
Havruta learning is a form of Jewish learning in which two students sit together as partners to study
a sacred text, independent from the direct mediation of a teacher. Havruta learning in many
permutations has found its way into a variety of Jewish (and even some non-Jewish) educational
contexts as a “go-to” classroom or program structure that educators may incorporate into their
course of instruction for many different reasons. Generally speaking, however, students have little or
no direct instruction or opportunities for learning how to learn in havruta. As a result, the great
potential that havruta learning could afford students—including ethical and spiritual growth, in
addition to intelletual and social learning— is often left unrealized. In our study, we crafted a
curriculum in which learning how to learn in havruta constituted the explicit architecture for the
students’ course of study. When Miriam, the seventh grader whose quote appears at the beginning of
the video, comments that she “never knew there could be anything different...” she is reflecting on
how learning Torah specifically through the framework of havruta partnership produced a different
kind of learning experience for her, one in which she felt empowered to discover new
interpretations of the Torah text she was studying.
The Pedagogy of Partnership developed from previous research which gave way to the conceptual
and pedagogical frameworks upon which our seventh grade curriculum was based. These
1
This pedagogy is also referred to as “Havruta Inspired Pedagogy.”
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frameworks are presented, in part, in this video, namely, “The Three Partners of Havruta Triangle,”
(Kent 2008; Holzer with Kent 2013) and “The Six Havruta Practices” (Kent 2010).
The Six Havruta Practices, of which two are explicitly named in the video, are: Listening and
Articulating; Wondering and Focusing; and, Challenging and Supporting. The conceptual ideal of
the Three Partners of Havruta invites learners to consider that they have the power to build a
partnership not only with one another but with the text as well, as an equal partner. The Havruta
Triangle suggests relationship of connection and responsibility to all three of its members. By
introducing a shared image of the Havruta Triangle, students not only can begin to imagine what a
successful havruta partnership might look like, but can also begin to monitor, as individual learners
and partners, how well they are doing in upholding a havruta partership of three and therefore
improve in their endeavor. While the Triangle provides a shared image and ideal, The Havruta
Practices empower students with the actual skills and tools they need to create those lines of
relationship and responsibility represented in the Havruta Triangle.
The students you see in the video comprise the seventh-grade cohort of a suburban synagogue
Hebrew school. Our POP course took place during the seventh grade’s regular weekly Hebrew
School meeting time from 6:00-7:30 for 8 weeks. In designing the course for this group we met with
the synagogue educators to learn about the students, the seventh grade curriculum, and to choose a
text that would be the focus of our havruta study. We chose the Jacob and Esau narrative, Genesis
25:19-28:9, because it was both familiar to students as a story but also, in a sense, unfamiliar as a text
with much depth to uncover and interpret. We, along with synagogue educators, thought that this
narrative, being a story of relationships, would also be developmentally appropriate and interesting
to b’nai mitzvah age students.
As a part of our research effort, we video recorded all eight sessions of the course. A few weeks
after the course ended, all of the students were interviewed by outside trained interviewers. Many of
the individual reflection clips featured in the video are taken from these interviews.
Features of the Pedagogy of Partnership as seen in the video
The video provides a glimpse of many components of the POP curriculum, including: opening and
closing rituals; direct instruction and exploration of the havruta frameworks and practices;
scaffolded exercises to try out and improve havruta practices; tools, such as the speech prompt cue
cards; study guides; and, various individual and group exercises for reflection.
Opening and Closing Ritual
Each class session began and ended with the group juggling game seen in the video (students in the
circle tossing a ball). This game was designed to welcome each person into the group at the
beginning of class and to say one reflection or appreciation at the end of each class. Importantly, this
routine was decided upon by the students themselves as their ritual for setting the tone of their
classtime and for setting apart this time from the regular routines of the day. The creation of such a
transition ritual in and out of the havruta study time is an important structural design feature of
POP. (Other rituals that other groups of adults and kids have used to serve this purpose often
involve singing a wordless melody or, in one case, even a song that the students had written
themselves.)
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Direct instruction
The video features a few instances of the direct instruction we provided for students. We see Orit
introduce the havruta triangle at the beginning of the course which opened an ongoing discussion
about the meaning and implications of the partnership of three. We later see Allison expand on the
work of partnership, framing this work fundamentally as the work of “seeking to understand.” From
“mini-lessons” such as these, we were able to involve students in exercises of exploration that
targeted particular dispositions (such as “seeking to understand”) or skills (such as Listening and
Articulating) necessary for creating productive and respectful havruta partnerships. One such
exercise appearing in the longer version of the video is the “Fact vs. Interpretation” exercise. In our
work with the group, we noted that students’ growing ability to read the text closely and notice
details and gaps in the text did not naturally lead to the skills of forming well-supported
interpretations. Instead, students were quick to form judgements, rather than interpretations,
confusing textual facts with opinions, and opinions with interpretations. The goal of the exercise
was to have students reconsider their own claims about the text in light of new awareness about
what could be considered dintinctly as textual fact or interpretation or opinion. This exercise also
highlights the responsive quality of POP. Close observation and documentation of students and
their work in real time affords teachers the opportunity to make important and timely adjustments in
instruction, such as our decision to create and implement this exercise when we did.
Havruta Study with Study Guides and Tools
Students studied in havruta for a significant part of each session with the help of study guides we
designed to support students in activating all three partners of havruta and often to highlight the use
of specific havruta practices—like Listening and Articulating. While not specifically emphasized in
the video, these study guides provided essential structure for partners to engage with one another
and the text in conversation independently, without the teacher. Toward the end of the video we see
Becky presenting one study guide or worksheet that she recognized as having helped her havruta
partnership go deeper into the text. From week to week, these havruta study guides built on one
another, moving students from exercises of close reading smaller excerpts of text to havruta tasks
that supported increasingly more interpretive and synthesizing work. In addition to reading and
discussion of text, many of these havruta study guides incorporated drawing, presentation, and
preparing for drama exercises. All of these activities provided modes for students to work together
to interpret or “seek to understand” one another and the text. These activities also functioned as a
way of capturing student ideas about the text and/or their partnership and provided a measure of
accountability to their havruta work. From a teaching perspective, the design of these study guides
constitutes much of the thought work and creativity of the planning process. As seen throughout
the video, we also provided students with tools such as the havruta speech prompt cards as a way to
operationalize, through language, key skills necessary for engaging in partnership and interpretation.
Reflection and Feedback
In order for students to become increasingly responsible for and skilled in their havruta
partnerships, POP builds in many different kinds of reflection exercises. As Ira explains in the video,
students were often asked to reflect on how well they were employing certain partnership skills and
name what it is that they need to work on for themselves and their partners. These reflections were
sometimes public and sometimes private; sometimes in writing and sometimes spoken. Reflections
and debriefing were built into study guides using the havruta triangle or havruta practices, the group
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juggling ritual, and “exit tickets” (written on an index card on the way out the door at the end of the
day). In addition, we conducted periodic full group reflection exercises using such experiential
education activities such as the “social borometer” and the “comfort zone.” Both of these exercises
ask students to place themselves physically in a mapped out space in the room to indicate their level
of skill or comfort with certain skills or ideas, see where their peers are, and discuss their challenges
and offer suggestions to one another. To help students build up their reflective capacity or
metacognition, we gave back to them, whenever possible, their own student work and previous
comments and ideas about the text and their partnership skills so that they could “go deeper” with
their insights and make new goals for themselves and their havruta partnerships.
Documentation and “Giving Back” Students’ Work and Ideas
As stated above, an important feature of POP is recording and giving back students their own work
and insights so that they may remember and build upon them. We did this in many small ways
throughout the course. The most vivid example of giving back students their work and words can be
seen in the video as students are making and presenting their havruta collages. This assessment
provided the havruta partnerships the opportunity to review the many facets of their work from
thoughout the course and consider which elements were most important to their learning and how
these elements related to one another. The collage format enabled students to physically layer and
place these elements in relationship to one another to make connections they may not have
otherwise. We gave back students all of their interpretive work including study guides and art work,
transcripts from reflection exercises, the havruta triangle, the havruta practices cue cards,
photographs of their havruta in action, and the entire text that we studied. In this final exercise of
the course, havruta partners were able to formuate and articulate through the artifacts of their own
experience what they learned and valued within and through their havruta partnerships of three.
The seventh graders had much to teach us about their learning, through their explicit ongoing
reflections and through their own havruta discussions and other various forms of their student
work. This video is meant to bring to light some of what they taught us about the power and worthy
challenges of learning Torah through the Pedagogy of Partnership.
References
Holzer, E. with O. Kent (2013). A philosophy of havruta: Understanding and teaching the art of text study in
pairs. Brighton: Academic Studies Press.
Kent, O. (2008). Interactive text study and the co-construction of meaning: Havruta in the DeLeT beit midrash.
PhD dissertation, Brandeis University.
Kent, O. (2010). A theory of havruta learning. Journal of Jewish Education, 76(3), 215-245.
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